


the tiny ways we say 'i love you'

by captaincastello



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Office, Best Friends, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 17:24:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15199754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captaincastello/pseuds/captaincastello
Summary: Best friends Allura and Lance team up to secretly get their two coworkers together.The thing is, Lance has always been in love with Allura ever since they were kids. Will their little project help them get closer to figuring out what they are, and what they could be to each other?





	the tiny ways we say 'i love you'

**Author's Note:**

> my first allurance fic!! ;;o;; with a side dish of sheith <3
> 
> this idea has been slowly growing in my mind for months, and i'm just glad i finally got the first chapter off my chest ;;w;; now i'm praying that i don't hit another long snag and hopefully finish this *fingers crossed*
> 
> i hope you enjoy!!

 

 

 

“There’s got to be limits, right?” Allura frowns at her neatly color-coded notebook. She has already committed the entirety of her lecture to memory the night before, but she loves challenging herself a bit by creating new mathematical problems for her to solve. “I mean, I thought the sweaters we gave them were glaringly obvious!”

“One says ‘ _peanut butter_ ’, and the other says ‘ _jelly’_ ,” Lance says with heavy emphasis on each word, and a couple of theatrical swings of both arms for added effect. “Everyone knows they go well together. How could they miss the implication?”

Shiro loved his sweater for its minimalistic design—

 

 **Shiro** : Why _PEANUT BUTTER_?

 **Lance** : Why not?

 **Shiro** : … you’re right.

 

—while Keith was happy to be given something practical for the weather.

 

 **Keith** : … it says _JELLY_.

 **Allura** : I was looking for something with your name on it, and this was the closest because it’s only one letter error from _KELLY_ , which is relatively close to _KEITH_.

 **Keith** : … I see your point. I'm going to use it now.

 

They both wore it without knowing about the other matching sweater until they saw each other an hour later during the company Christmas party, after which the only compliments they threw each other went along the lines of _“You look warm”_ or _“I love this font”_. Lance had never laughed-cried so hard over his red cup.

Allura went for the most cliché move in the book and managed to subtly lead them under a mistletoe, and it was as effective as placing a wet phone in cooked rice. Shiro’s immediate reaction was to say, _“Oh, we shouldn’t get in the way of couples who’d want to stand here,”_ to which Keith agreed with a simple _“Can’t ruin other people’s Christmas”_ before they both walked away and to the direction of the snack table. And that was how Lance discovered he could still laugh-cry harder than his previous laugh-cry.

 “I’ll admit, Shiro’s a real piece of work,” Allura says with the weary sigh of a friend who’s been witnessing another friend trip on the same wire for every day of eleven years. “Last year, a former employee asked him for some consultation for her doctorate paper—she was the Chairperson of the Department of Sociology, and an officer in the Faculty Union, mind you—and he never realized she was seeing him for totally different reasons until I literally blinked it to him in Morse code on their fourth meeting.”

“He’ll never survive without you,” Lance sighs as he transfers all the green peas from his plate to Allura’s.

“Oh darling, he won’t,” Allura replies, her eyes never leaving the mathematical orchestra she’s conducting, thereby missing the edges of Lance’s mouth quirk up just a tiny bit at the word _darling_. It’s a name she casually drops for just about every one of their other friends, but Lance just honestly likes the way the word dangles from her lips. Or any word to be honest. She could say _goat farts_ or _sweaty testicles_ and it would still sound like Tom Hiddleston’s dreamy laugh caught in a jar.

“So what’s next on the agenda? Valentine’s is coming up in a couple of months,” Lance says as he scrolls through the calendar on his phone. “We could probably just give them a set of matching shirts that say _Salt_ and _Pepper_. Or something much bolder, like _Hand_ and _Glove_ , or _Nut_ and _Bolt_.”

Allura lets out a soft giggle. She sets her notebook aside and starts to eat from her large pile of green peas. “Maybe we should canvass on much more couple-ish things. Look for something that gives a clearer message.”

“You mean, like basically, we’re going to do some window-shopping like a couple to look for couple things for another couple,” Lance says, his fork in the air.

“Yeah, basically.” Allura replies.

“I’m going to get even deeper in Darren’s shit-list, aren’t I?” He says flatly, an eyebrow disappearing higher up his forehead.

“Ugh, if his goal is to get me to become his girlfriend, he should stop trying to get my friends out of the way,” she says with a not-so-gentle stab into her pork cutlets. “But honestly, how does he even think I’m considering _him_? I’m trying to drop some hints that he annoys me, but he’s too full of himself to even start listening to what I say.”

Lance leans in closer and drops his voice to a volume barely higher than a whisper.

“Do you want me to beat him up for you? Replace his favorite mirror with a distorting one like in a funhouse? Give him mayonnaise disguised as yoghurt?”

Allura’s laugh is loud enough that some people in the pantry turn their heads around, but Lance sees nothing else apart from her face. She’s glowing, as usual, but the light always seems to get a little brighter when she throws her head back and laughs.

“You’ll get horribly mangled and injured, and possibly lose your teaching license for me? That’s sweet.”

“The things we do for love, hon,” Lance nods dramatically.

“Hm, people do even crazier things,” Allura says with a wink. “Like using a garden hose to create a rainbow during a rainless summer to impress a girl who happened to mention she missed rainbows.”

“Hey, you liked it,” Lance says defensively, a bit of pink spreading on his cheeks. “Even if Brielle didn’t. And come on, that doesn’t exactly count as crazy.”

“Not when you’re seven years old and used lawn gnomes to create a lopsided heart in her front yard,” Allura says with another hearty laugh. “Although Brielle _did_ have a point—it was a complete waste of water, and you ruined their garden. But I still think it was amazing, and well, thoughtful.”

Lance recognizes that soft gaze, the one laced with gentleness yet bears an intensity that pulls you in like a tornado and leaves you internally ruined in the best possible way. He looks back down at his food, silently reminding himself that constant exposure to that particular face should already leave him immune to it.

It’s a silly memory to even think about. Brielle was a friend of Allura’s, was a popular girl in elementary school who also happened to be living in the same area. Lance happened to be in the same ice cream parlor one summer when she exclaimed about how it would be nice to have some rain and see a rainbow. The next day, Lance came and uprooted their garden gnomes (a sudden spark of creativity and inspiration!) to create what he thought should be a bold confession, and “made rain happen” for Brielle. Allura and some other girls happened to be there and witnessed the entire embarrassing debacle. Brielle was so mortified that she stopped talking to him for the rest of the year. Naturally talk of Rain Boy Lance spread throughout the whole school, and he got teased for it for a whole month until it died over to make way for the next ridiculous thing for everyone to go crazy over.

It sucked while it lasted, but there was one thing—or one friend—that he gained from the whole experience that, in hindsight, made it all worth it.

Among the murky sea of snotty young faces, Allura’s genuine smile would be the beacon that guided him to a little spot of happiness in each day. She stood up for him when the biggest kid at school threatened to “make it rain” for him in the cafeteria, unleashing a string of words that would always ring loudly in his brain: “He _did_ make it rain, _and_ he made a rainbow. He’s a water mage, obviously. What’s _your_ superpower?” A couple of days later, the teasing lessened. An entire week later, people didn’t mind sharing a table with him during lunch.

Brielle kind of shunned Allura out from her group after that, but Allura was too cool to bother with all the pre-teen drama. After all, she was pretty psyched about being friends with someone who had “quite the magical affinity with water”. Lance thought she was crazy to leave the populars, but he couldn’t help but admire her for simply being the first to look for him in the cafeteria.

“You’re here again,” he told her once she sat down across from him for the third time that week.

“And you, too,” she said. Her smile was bright, and her eyes hungry as she motioned to his tray. “Are you going to eat those green peas?”

Lance’s eyes darted downward to his tray. He would always save his favorite part of the dish for last, and he had a habit of piling them to one side to separate them from the rest.

“Nah,” he said a couple of seconds later with nothing more than a shrug before spooning the peas and placing them in Allura’s plate. Her smile grew brighter, and he would only realize much later that he had grown a new kind of weakness.

She came and sat beside him every day until graduation, and he gave her a shoulder to cry on when she lost her mom to an accident a couple of years later. She helped him get his courage back and talk to girls; he temporarily stole someone’s bike and sneaked out of school when she misplaced her Student Council Election speech back home. She made sure he didn’t feel any less than his other siblings by celebrating his every tiny victory; he held her up the couple of times she did her best and still got her heart broken.

It’s always been the two of them that there seemed to be no other permissible way but to be together.

Because she’s his best friend, and him, hers.

 “Okay, so let’s extend that garden-gnome level of romance to our good friends,” Lance says after one last spoonful of chicken _paella_. “My last class ends at 5:55PM. I could dismiss five minutes early and meet you at the fountain in the quad.”

“We could have dinner first,” Allura says. “Any type of cuisine you want for later?”

“We could just take something to go, so we could maximize the time to walk around,” he replies as he takes two bananas from Allura’s bag for a healthy desert.

“Good thinking,” she says as she swallows down the last of her cutlets and accepts the second banana offered to her. She opens her notebook from the backmost page and begins to draft a list. “Maybe we should also think about what potential things to check out so that we don’t waste too much time. What’s the most romantic thing you could give to someone?”

“Hm, that’s a tough one,” Lance says, his eyebrows furrowed in thought. “Giving rainbows was the height of my romantic career. I don’t think I would ever top that stunt in this lifetime.”

Allura’s about to take a sip of tea from her steaming mug, but she loses to another fit of giggles and has to set it back down to avoid making a mess. Even if she did, Lance already has a spare blazer and pressed clean shirt for her in his designated Allura-drawer under his desk.

Once her shoulder stops shaking from the aftershocks of laughter, Lance clears his throat and chews on his lip, before dropping his next question with a much sober tone. “Well, what would _you_ want?”

“Me?” Allura blinks, her mug poised halfway to her lips.

“I mean, maybe we could try to look at the receiver’s perspective?” Lance adds quickly.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Allura says thoughtfully. “Flowers, I guess, unless you’ve got a pollen allergy.”

“Do you have a pollen allergy?”

“No, and I wouldn’t mind flowers, personally,” Allura says with a tiny shrug. “But I also think that romance shouldn’t be all about grand gestures. They can be tiny everyday things that keep you afloat even when you’re not aware of it. They can be simple things we never really quite think about, until…”

She trails off and falls into a contemplative pause that lasts for more than a couple of seconds, her thoughts taking off on a tangent of their own until the silence stretches long enough for Lance to feel like it might be his turn to contribute to the conversation.

“… Until what?” He says just as Keith comes into the pantry like a perfectly timed plot device to avoid the conclusion to what now belongs to an ongoing list of things that will keep Lance up at night.

They both share a look and a smile when they see that Keith is wearing their gift. He sees them and raises his hand in acknowledgement before turning to the fridge and taking out his and Shiro’s lunches to heat them up in the microwave. Unless the weather is real bad outside, they usually eat out on the rooftop instead of in the pantry with the rest of the faculty.

“Where’s Shiro?” Allura says as she puts her notebook aside.

“He’s just returning now from his class,” Keith replies, a hip leaning against the counter. “He had to talk to a couple of students who are running late with their research papers.”

“Well, you guys can sit here,” Allura says as she packs her lunch back into her bag. “Lance and I are just cleaning up.”

“Hey, Keith,” Lance says, a mischievous glint in his eyes. “That sweater really does suit you.”

“Thanks, it’s from Allura.”

“I kind of have a feeling that it might look better on Shiro’s bedroom floor.”

A second passes by in which Allura almost drops her mug, and Keith’s eyes dart sideways as he processes this statement. Lance remains unblinking, anticipating the next unpredictable reaction Keith might just throw their way for the hundredth time.

“That’s absurd,” he finally responds, a most genuinely confused expression plastered on his face. “Why would I recklessly leave my sweater in his apartment when I can’t part with it in this weather?”

Before Lance can open his mouth for a reply, Shiro comes in and sees Keith waiting by the microwave. Their eyes meet, and immediately the room fills up with imaginary _shoujo manga_ flower petals, and somewhere around the world a long-lost son is reunited with his mother, a small flock of the already declared extinct Dodo birds is discovered in a remote island in the Indian Ocean.

“Hey, guys,” Shiro says, looking at them for only a second before he turns back to Keith to tell him he’s just the absolute best for heating up his lunch.

Over at their table, Allura pats Lance on the shoulder in mock consolation.

“We’ll do better next time.”


End file.
